Wednesday Weekly: "Contract," my ass.

I'm late with this.

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Here’s a helpful suggestion for those of you tending bar, or working in an establishment that sells beer – especially draft beer.

Don’t say the “C” word. I’ve heard it twice in recent weeks, and it makes me want to find a mouthpiece and go to court.

For the uninitiated, and in its full, most distasteful usage, the “C” word is “Contract.”

Whether or not the three-tier distribution system for alcoholic beverages survives in its present form is a matter for politicians, lawyers and judges to decide. Until it changes, it is plainly illegal for an entity – your bar, a sporting venue, a concert hall – to sign a “contract” with a beer wholesaler. I’m speaking here in the sense of a contract to sell only that wholesaler’s beers, and no others.

Pay-to-play is not something enshrined with dual signatures and posted on the Internet. Yes, there may well be understandings, nods, glances, winks, back-scratching, oral sex, or any number of other unofficial, non-contractual agreements that blatantly violate the spirit of the law but leave no paper trail for people like me to make copies and post on Smoking Gun.

However, there cannot be such contracts, and because of this, if you say aloud something on the order of, “We can’t do business with you because we have a contract with SABMillerMolsonCoorsABInbev,” it is a faux pas that conceivably might lead to heightened interest from state regulatory authorities. None of us wants that, even me. As angry as it makes me, I’m too concerned with good karma to turn you in. Unlike the majority of monopolistic corporate behemoths, I have ethical standards, although you’re going to get a soapbox lecture, right here, right now.

The reason why your boss, owner or manager wants you to think there is a contract precluding a swapping of taps or further action in the direction of diversity is that it removes the painful necessity of thinking about product options. It sidesteps the annoying imperative of actually acting on changing consumer needs in a beer marketplace infinitely more diverse than the narrow lighter-shade-of-gold preferred by the business-as-usual, good old boy crowd of movers, shakers and bribe-takers.

Furthermore, at least in Southern Indiana, please don’t say you have “no choice” except to buy beer from a wholesaler like Monarch, because your employer cites the imperative of buying locally and insists that he or she is doing so because Monarch is local.

Emphatically, and even though I don’t have a dog in this race ... Monarch is not “locally” owned, unless you’re living in Indianapolis (or Andorra, as far as I know).

In fact, not only is Monarch not “locally” owned insofar as residents of the Falls Cities are concerned, it hardly has anything to do with local anything. Monarch is one of the largest, if not absolutely the largest, mass market beer wholesalers in the Midwest. True, a decade ago it bought out two former Jeffersonville businesses that actually were owned locally, Clark County Beverage and Nachand Beverage. By doing so, it removed local businesses. It did not become one.

Sorry kids, but buying beer from Ted Throckmorton or the late Ed Schueler back in 1991 no longer qualifies the monolith that purchased them as “local” apart from exercises in nostalgia and selective memory – and let me add that Ed was one of the finest persons I’ve known at any level of the beer business, period. From the perspective of “local,” those two were local. Monarch is not.

Make no mistake: When I ask the question, “Would you consider a locally brewed craft beer to sell at your establishment,” it is your undisputed right to say “no,” just as it is my responsibility to try to explain the reasons why you should do so, and without my appealing to “buy local” as a mantra intended to obscure the issue.

But: It is purely nonsensical to use excuses like “contracts,” “locally” owned wholesalers more than a hundred miles away, or “we have no choice.” You have numerous choices, few of which even remotely compromise the day-in, day-out hegemony of the beer world’s biggest selling names.

Rather, having NABC on tap alongside Lite and the Silver Bullet achieves providential goal of making your customers happy by recognizing that not all of them are satisfied with the status quo and will pay for an honest beer with flavor, brewed locally.

What the hell is wrong with that, other than it scares the monopolists?